Vestoj the Journal of Sartorial Matters
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Vestoj The Journal of Sartorial Matters Issue Five oN sLoWNess Vestoj The Journal of Sartorial Matters Issue Five On Slowness tABLe oF CoNteNts 9 edItor’s Letter 67 A tIme For dressINg CONVERSATIONS ON 225 Flash Fiction: On the Symbolic SLOWNESS IN prAIse oF shAdoWs 13 refashIoNINg tIme Importance of Splendour By Anja Aronowsky Cronberg By Junichiro Tanizaki On The Cultural and Social By Professor Barbara Vinken Mediations of Temporal 131 DRIES VAN NOTEN 189 fashIoNINg reBIrth Infrastuctures 73 The dIgNIty oF On Avoiding Traps, Trickery On Mourning and Memory By Dr Michelle Bastian BeAuty ANd FItNess and Other Shenanigans in a Papua New Guinea Village On May Morris and By Dr John Barker 21 the CoNtemplatIVe LIFe the Arts and Crafts Movement 137 HUSSEIN CHALAYAN On Slowing Down Production By Karlijn Slegers On Being Painted into 199 the eNdLess streAm by Elongating Wear a Corner and Getting Stuck On How to Recognise the By Father Michael Casey OCSO 81 Boro mottainai Devils of Our Own Creation As told to Laura Gardner On the Beauty of Things 143 MARGARET HOWELL Paintings by Ying Yan Quek Impermanent, Imperfect On Becoming Less 29 SpINNINg For Freedom and Incomplete Self-Conscious, Awkward 209 The Art oF jeANs On How Viewing Khadi as By Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada and Gauche On Mending and Making Do Theatre Unravels the Narrative By Anja Aronowsky Cronberg of Mahatma Gandhi 97 Flash Fiction: 149 CHRISTOPHE LEMAIRE With photographs by Justine By Dr Susan S. Bean WhAt AN oLd On Aiming for the Ideal Kurland WomAN WILL WeAr While Rooting for Reality 41 SloW tIme By Lydia Davis 225 machINe oIL Is god’s tIme 155 NIGEL CABOURN smeLLs sWeet On Patience in the 103 dressINg IN On Travelling the World By Maria Fusco Age of Hypermodernity shAdoWs ANd LIght and Telling Stories By Dr Donald B. Kraybill On the Birth of Fashion 229 Flash Fiction: Photography The mIddLe drawer 49 BetWIxt Photographs by 161 IdLe Days By Hortense Calisher ANd BetWeeN Edward Steichen On Warm Gravel, Languid On Liminal Time in the Afternoons and Pointing 246 Notes Context of the Fashion Show 117 FAshIoN Freeze FrAme Overhead for the Passing Day By Nathalie Khan On Human Artefacts Photographs by Mark 250 CoNtrIButors and Stopping the Clock Borthwick 59 DweLLINg tIme By Nilgin Yusuf 254 the Vestoj mANIFesto On Examining Experience 179 sLoW ANd steAdy Economy and the Third 123 Flash Fiction: WINs the race Space in Fashion dIALogue BetWeeN On Making a Case for Fashion By Karinna Nobbs fashIoN ANd deAth Education in Cultural Capitalism With photographs by Polly Brown By Giacomo Leopardi By Professor Frances Corner Vestoj On Slowness 5 Masthead Colophon Vestoj Issue FIVe Is edItorIAL AdVIsory BoArd Editor-in-Chief and Publisher Professor Frances Corner This is the fifth issue of Vestoj. It was published Vestoj HQ is still located on the beautiful rue Anja Aronowsky Cronberg Head of College at London College in autumn 2014. Beranger, in the heart of Le Marais, in a house of Fashion, London with heavy doors that goes under the number 7. It was was printed and bound by Artes Gráficas The postcode is still 75003, and the city is still Designed by Professor Caroline Evans Palermo in Madrid, Spain. The paper stock Paris. Now you can probably guess that this is Erik Hartin & Moa Pårup Reader in Fashion History and Theory at Central employed is Cyclus Offset, a recycled paper, Paris, France, not Paris, Texas, Paris, Ontario Saint Martins School of Art and Design, London with the weight of 90 grams per square meter. or even Paris, Kiribati. On another note, did The dust jacket conceiling the coptic bind of you know that Kansas City is also called Paris Art Editor Professor Christopher Breward the journal is printed on Magno Satin with of the Plains? And that Saskatoon is also known Lisa Rovner Principal of Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh the weight of 150 grams per square meter. as Paris of the Prairies? Olivier Saillard a note on the type: ’When in doubt, use Caslon’ If you want to reach us to say something nice or Sub Editor Curator at Musée de la Mode et du Costume, is an age-old typographer’s adage. William Caslon to let us know that we could have done so much Karlijn Slegers Palais Galliera, Paris was an eighteenth century British type designer, better, the address is [email protected]. If you want who started a type foundry producing wildly popular more Vestoj and can’t be arsed to wait around for Dr Valerie Steele alphabets cast in lead, to use with the letterpress another year (yes, that’s how long it takes us!), Web Editor Director and Chief Curator, Museum at the printing techniques available at the time. This issue you can stay updated on our Facebook account Laura Gardner Fashion Institute of Technology, New York of Vestoj employs Caslon, in a variety of cuts (to be or at www.vestoj.com. precise: Ed Benguiat’s ITC Caslon 224; Bitstream’s Professor Peter McNeil Open Face Caslon; Adobe Caslon; Caslon Old Face; Interns Professor, Centre for Fashion Studies at and Founder’s Caslon, used for this text). None Marta Franceschini Stockholm University, Stockholm and University is more true to the original design than the other of Technology, Sydney – the problem with trying to authentically reproduce Natasha Palazzo letterforms of three centuries ago quickly becomes Professor Elizabeth Wilson evident when considering that even Caslon’s own Contact: first [email protected] Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies at London designs were anything but original. William Caslon Vestoj is published under the patronage of London College of Fashion, London was heavily influenced by Dutch letter designs that College of Fashion, so for this issue we want to were already antiquated at the time. Adding to this again extend our humble gratitude to Frances Sarah Mower is the fact that Caslon’s foundry produced a range Corner and London College of Fashion – without Ambassador for Emerging Talent at of letterforms, but not one with the name ’Caslon’. them you would not be holding this issue in your The British Fashion Council, London When designers today refer to the font of that name, hands right now. it could be any one of a wide variety of different Hamish Bowles revivals, varying in size, weight, contrast and pretty We would also like to thank Monkey Myron, International Editor-at-Large at much everything else, but all with a very long, shared Mary Myron, Bess Nielsen, Mathias Deon, American Vogue, New York heritage harking back to the first Roman printed Sophie Demay, Susanne Tide Frater, Patrick letterforms of the Renaissance. Scallon, Taque Hirakawa, Laurence Oliver, Gon Aya, Studio Blanco, Alexandra Senes, Our ISSN number is 2000-4036. You can buy Vestoj Mimosa Spencer, Scarlett Rouge Newton, from all the best (obviously!) newsstands and Emily McGuire François Quintin stores around the world, and also directly from us. and the Fondation Galeries Lafayette. Look at the website for details, www.vestoj.com. ‘What an Old Woman Will Wear’ most recently The views expressed in Vestoj sometimes coincide published in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. with the editors’, but then again other times they Copyright © 2009 by Lydia Davis. Reprinted by don’t. Basically, if you want to complain, feel free permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC to do so. We love a good ol’ rant, but we’ll probably, and Penguin Books. annoyingly, sit on the fence. As we have no advertising we won’t give you the If you want to reproduce anything from the usual blurb about who to contact to bribe us into magazine, don’t forget to ask permission first. featuring your products. Give unselfishly instead! Vestoj On Slowness 7 our own time as simultaneously the most progressive and the most relentlessly accelerated. The modernist project, however, firmly rooted the relationship between progress and speed, and in so doing also forever altered our notion of time. A universal temporal framework, with time zones, seasonal changes and accurate clocks, was constructed with the help of new technology, and the previous more subjective understanding of time had to make way for expedience and the hustle of modern life. With a more synchronised understanding of time, edItor’s Letter the future also became easier to grasp and, by extension, to control. For a In Slowness Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, remarks that ‘there is a secret bond between slowness and memory, future that can be measured in terms between speed and forgetting’. In of the knowable present, is a malle- the fashion system this bond seems able future, a future that can be to take on a particularly poignant shaped according to our will. meaning, with the degree of velocity With the advent of modernity, often appearing directly proportional past, present and future came to to the time it takes to forget a style be understood as a linear evolution, that just moments ago it seemed and the ‘temporal architecture’ that we could not live without. philosopher Krzysztof Pomian refers The speed of change is a grow- to in L’Ordre du Temps turned into ing complaint about fashion, both an implicit and integral part of the amongst those whose livelihoods experience of being modern. Sharing depend on it, and amongst those the same chronology is tantamount who observe these ceaseless shifts to sharing a similar basic understanding from afar. Grumbles about a ubiqui- of the world, but we must not forget tous acceleration are nothing new that time is a social construct. The however; in fact, the grievance we sociologist Norbert Elias and the appear to harbour against velocity philosopher Michel Foucault have is as old as modernity itself.